Saturday, May 19, 2012

GNUmed conference took place in Leipzig Germany today. We started roughly 9:30 am and pretty much continued until 3:30pm with few short breaks.

The group consisted of 10 people. Apart from a representative of a local software support company and an network specialist there was one Debian packager, two physiotherapists and 5 physicians.

Karsten started off by introducing himself and announcing the schedule. I took over and provided an overview of GNUmed from a historical point of view. I cited oloh.net which demonstrates how GNUmed's codebase evolved (who contributed what and when), demonstrated GNUmed infrastructure (blog, wiki, download pages), demoed available installation packages for Windows and Linux and talked about LIve-DVD and friends.

This was followed by Karsten introducing GNUmed 1.2 (rc4) for about 60 minutes. He basically came up with an imaginary patient and a visit in the practice and showed how to document health problems, allergies, lab data and much more. Finally an invoice was created to show off billing. This was will received and the people who were there stated that they were amazed how much GNUmed is capable of and how well it supports medical worksflows

I took over once again and demonstrated how GNUmed packages are prepared on MS-Windows and what is involved in keeping the up-to-date. I took the liberty to actually install the packages, to bootstrap a database and to show that the same client that was demonstrated on Linux was running right there in Windows. A short discussion came up on how to improve certain ares of the packages. All were valid points and will most likely be covered by future releases.

We had a short break which was largely used for discussions among the attending crowd.

Andreas from Debian-med continued the afternoon session by introducing Debian, Debian-med and how distributions try to interact with upstream (eg. GNUmed project members). He demonstrated that in Debian-med and in GNUmed there are various areas where people without coding abilities can make substantial contributions.

Stephan, a physiotherapist who has been using GNUmed for 5 years in live-mode gave an inspiring presentation on how GNUmed can be used in a physiotherapy practice. He elaborated on his finding as a user and told us that he is very happy with GNUmed and how efficiently any problem coming up is handled and corrected.

Just short of 4pm we briefly touched the issues webinterface, cloud based GNUmed and GNUmed on USB-drives.

All this talk about GNUmed really made us hungry so we wrapped up at the steak house around the corner. All people attending the mini-conference expressed their believe on GNUmed having great potential in Germany. I even think that GNUmed has even greater potential outside of Germany.

We wanted to show GNUmed interacting with FreeDiams but recent changes in FreeDiams did not allow for a full-blown demo. We briefly touched the issue of GNUmed's current non-availability on MacOS but stated that this was subject to change and does not have a technical but ressources-associated background.

All in all a nice and productive get-together which showed how far GNUmed has advanced.

We did record a number of presentations but have yet to check out if the recorded material is of any usable quality.